Review by Kirkus Book Review
"The future's open wide" according to "I Melt With You," the song by Modern English that lends other lyrics to the title of this time-looping fiction debut. Maybe they meant the past, too? Justin Warren, a disaffected student waiting for high school to end, finds himself enmeshed in hard-to-explain (and understand) circumstances in this mystery saga of time travel, adolescent heartache, and coming-of-age angst. Finding himself transported after an accident from 2023 to the year 1985, Justin is confronted with perplexing details about his complicated family history. Among the pre-millennial teens Justin meets is Rose Yin, a do-gooder and diligent student who becomes one of his few allies in unraveling the mysteries of not only his time travel, but also a 1985 crime that affected the course of his family's life. (Rounding out the cast of characters for both settings are enough teens, teachers, and family members of varying backgrounds, sexual orientations, and personality types to populate whatever screen adaptation of the work results from the book's selection by Mindy Kaling for her Mindy's Book Studio publishing and production project.) Realizing he may have a last-minute opportunity to alter his family's tragic history, Justin puzzles through the facts as he recalls them and the truths he uncovers in his new (old) hometown. While dealing with her own teenage miseries and insecurities, Rose lends a sympathetic ear and transportation to the out-of-sync Justin--who bemoans the lack of crime-solving technology available to him in 1985 and struggles to use a rotary phone in one hilarious episode. Thoman's ambitious timeline of events is both expansive and compressed, with the storyline unfolding over the course of both one week and 38 years, and her portrayal of teenagers in varying degrees of crisis is sympathetic. A novel look at strange (and stranger) things. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
